Between October 2022 and February 2023, the CGAC hosted Lives, a solo exhibition from the artist and film-maker, Claudio Zulian, which focused on the production of a new work inspired by the neighbourhood of Vite, in Santiago de Compostela.

As an artist and researcher, Claudio Zulian’s projects have often addressed the different ways of constructing the symbolic imaginaries of the city and its neighbourhoods, through the lives, memories and desires of its inhabitants. Along these lines, the exhibition he presented in the CGAC resulted in an artist's workshop, conceived as a space for reflection, experience and creation around the urban fabric and the communities that inhabit it. As the CGAC is located in the neighbourhood of San Pedro, selecting this district as the object, or at least, as a space for a workshop project, seemed a logical choice.

The San Pedro neighbourhood, located on the east of Santiago de Compostela, came into being as a suburb that grew around the French Camino, through which pilgrims entered the historic centre of the city within its walls.

Its expansion was favoured by the establishment of various religious orders, which built the monasteries of San Domingos de Bonaval, San Pedro de Fóra and Belvís.

The neighbourhood’s development was marked by the city’s slow growth and by the peculiar structure of its historical centre, which has preserved broad swathes of agricultural land and open spaces among the blocks of buildings.

Today, the neighbourhood comprises more than thirty narrow streets, many of them pedestrianised or with restricted traffic, with blocks that include large areas free of buildings.

To the north it is limited by the parks of San Domingos de Bonaval and Monte da Almáciga, to the west by the park of Belvís, and to the south and east by the Avenida de Lugo, a heavily trafficked thoroughfare.

The Rúa de San Pedro and its prolongation in Concheiros are the main entry points for pilgrims and are home to most of the businesses in the area.

The neighbourhood has religious buildings, such as the convent of Belvís, the churches of San Pedro and Nosa Señora da Angustia, as well as other buildings linked to the Church, such as the Don Bosco Youth Centre and the Lower Seminary, which houses a pilgrims' hostel. In the vicinity of Belvís Park there are several schools, and Bonaval Park houses the Museo do Pobo Galego and the CGAC. The neighbourhood also has a socio-cultural centre, various cultural associations, and several educational centres that complete the wide range of cultural activities on offer.

Over a period of one week, a series of discussions allowed the group of participants to establish, along with the artist, a common basis for action that, from a visual perspective, would allow them to address the complex reality of the neighbourhood. The proposal stressed the adoption of new, or at least under-explored, points of view, but it was time-consuming to implement. Thus, responding to appeals from the participants, both the artist and the museum agreed to extend the duration of the workshop and to spread the working sessions over an entire year. This decision has made it possible to bring to fruition a set of projects capable of forming a fresco of the neighbourhood and subsequently of being translated into an exhibition format.

In the workshop, a reading of the city as a complex organism was proposed, employing the concept of aesthetic experience as an initial tool, which is intended to refer, primarily, to all the information that our senses are capable of registering in an urban environment and which, in short, constitutes the heritage of citizenship (we all see the same façades, we all hear the same noises, etc.). On the other hand, there is the way in which this perception is constructed (based on the interpretive traditions of different groups: neighbourhood, tourists, experts in different areas of knowledge, etc.) and, finally, also the singularity of each of the individuals that inhabit the city and of those who observe it.

On the basis of these three dimensions of aesthetic experience, the workshop had a two-fold objective: on the one hand, to immerse itself in the different stories (social, political, town planning, local or global) that populate the city and reflect carefully on how the aesthetic experiences of its inhabitants are differentiated (for example, we do not see certain details of buildings, as they seem insignificant to us); and on the other, each of the participants in the workshop was invited to activate their own culture (experiential, visual, literary, philosophical, etc.) to thus be able to read the neighbourhood and, at the same time, weave a dialogue with its neighbours in the very act of observing.

The first phase of the workshop was carried out over one week, and this was followed by three face-to-face sessions lasting a few days and three on-line sessions.

All the participants were involved in the documentation gathering, action and project development processes. However, over time, the only works to have been completed are the five that are now on display in the CGAC, and which do not aspire to offer an exhaustive reading of the extremely rich vitality of the neighbourhood of San Pedro, rather to show the multiplicity of possible approaches and the creativity that it gives rise to.

They range between a documentary perspective and an aesthetic gaze. Moreover, the diversity of techniques and tools used confers a multifaceted character to the whole. Three of the pieces included in this exhibition (the works by Noemí Moisés Méndez-Benegassi Gamallo, Irina Malyuchenko and Candela Conde) are videographic works; Ramón Yoshimura, in turn, has produced a series of photographs, and Silvia G. Armesto, a set of charcoals and watercolours on paper.

This project is part of a line of work from the CGAC aimed at encouraging the participation of the public and the connection with the potential users of the museum, with the residents of neighbourhood, and with the non-monumental districts of our city, the cornerstones of the urban fabric that keep contemporary popular culture alive. It is this line that frames Claudio Zulian’s project Vidas, which benefited from the collaboration and active participation of the residents of the neighbourhood of Vite (2022-2023); the exercise of solidarity-based curatorship entailed by The Collective Exhibition of a Collective (2019), featuring works from the CGAC Collection selected and staged as an exhibition by the people involved in the Na Varanda educational and creative project, or the ongoing community action programme, O forno da Amara, which aims to bring the CGAC closer to the elderly through the photographs that preserve their memory.